A Discourse Perspective for Critical Public Relations Research: Life Sciences Network and the Battle for Truth

Abstract

Critical public relations scholarship is increasingly required to justify the contribution that is made to theory and practice. Within this article, an integrated political economy and discourse analysis is deployed to examine a progenetic engineering advocacy campaign conducted by the Life Sciences Network in New Zealand. The analysis demonstrates the value of examining the sociopolitical contexts in which public rela-tions operates and the discourses that it seeks to produce or influence and thus pro-vides a constructive foundation for further critical research. James E. Grunig (2001) stated that “in a professional field such as public rela-tions, I believe scholars must go beyond criticizing theories; they also have the obligation to replace theories with something better—an obligation that many critical scholars do not fulfil ” (p. 17). Although many critical scholars claim that their work does indeed attempt to offer new ways of thinking about public rela-tions—variously from postmodernist (Holtzhausen, 2000; McKie, 2001), cul-tural studies (Mickey, 1998), sociological (L’Etang & Pieckza, 1996), political